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In the beginning it was just another piece of seamy, suburban sadness: schoolteacher Paul Solomon finding his wife, Betty Jeanne, 40, shot to death in their Westchester County, N.Y., apartment in January 1989. But all that changed with the arrest a year later of 26-year-old Carolyn Warmus, a blond, attractive computer instructor who'd taught at Paul's elementary school. Warmus had been Solomon's lover and, said prosecutors, she killed his wife with nine bullets from a .25-caliber pistol after his attempts to break off the affair. With reports that Warmus had had other obsessive relationships with unavailable men, it became the "Fatal Attraction" murder, a reference to the 1987 hit thriller.
Now Warmus is on trial for murder, and the case has become a media phenomenon. Three books are in the works and two movie deals have been signed - despite the fact that no verdict is expected till spring and Warmus has a reasonable chance of going free. HBO paid the victim's husband $15,000 for movie rights and will give him $150,000 more if the film is made. Tentative title: "The Paul Solomon Story."
The Carolyn Warmus story, according to press reports and testimony, is a chilling tale of loneliness and obsession. The daughter of an insurance tycoon, Warmus grew up in a prosperous Detroit suburb. She attended the University of Michigan, where, articles have documented, she formed one of a series of bizarre attachments. After a graduate student broke up with Warmus and began seeing another woman, she allegedly harassed the couple for months with calls and notes. He finally obtained an injunction ordering Warmus to keep away from them. After their 1984 wedding, a judge permanently barred Warmus "from communicating with the plaintiffs."
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Warmus's pattern allegedly turned deadly after she moved east and met Solomon, now 41. A short, intense man who was one of Greenville Elementary School's most respected teachers, he began his secret liaisons with Warmus in 1987. Astonishingly, Warmus joined the Solomons for dinner and even took their daughter on a ski trip. When Solomon tried to cool off the affair, prosecutors say that Warmus resisted. Key government witness Vincent Parco, a private investigator, says he sold Warmus a gun and silencer for $2,500 before Betty Jeanne's murder. (Parco says he had met Warmus a few years earlier when she hired him to investigate another boyfriend.)
A terrified woman called 911 from the Solomon home at 7:15 the night Betty Jeanne was slain, but the operator can only remember her crying out ". trying to kill me." Warmus insists she was driving to meet Solomon at the Treetops Restaurant in Yonkers, N.Y., around the time the killing took place, and had sex with him in her car at 11 o'clock. Warmus's infatuation continued with Betty Jeanne dead, say prosecutors: in August, she stalked Solomon and a new girlfriend to Puerto Rico and wrote at least 15 cards and letters to him in 1989. "You are the most important thing in my life," read one.
The case against Warmus is hardly airtight. Police never found the weapon, and the evidence tying her to the murder is circumstantial. Warmus's attorney, David Lewis, insists his client was framed by "Parco and his associates," although he has yet to explain why. During his cross-examination of Solomon last week, he attempted to portray the teacher as a manipulative womanizer who led Warmus on, and who accepted the prosecution's offer of immunity because he had something to hide. Lewis even suggests Solomon underscored the Hollywood parallels for homicide investigators. Under cross-examination, Solomon revealed that when asked by police for a photo of Warmus, he chose a color snapshot taken in her classroom. In an eerie echo of the infamous boiled-bunny scene in "Fatal Attraction," Warmus is posing with a picture of pet rabbits.
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